Jerzy Skolimowski

Film director, script writer, actor. He is also a poet and painter, and was a boxer in his youth. He was born in 1938 (some sources quote documents, which the director says are forged, giving 1936 as his year of birth).

He graduated in ethnography from Warsaw University in 1959, and in directing from the National Film and Theatre School (today's PWSFTviT) in Łódź in 1963. His short film "Boks / Boxing" won the Grand Prix at the International Sport Film Festival in Budapest in 1962. He debuted as a script writer in 1960 with the film "Niewinni czarodzieje / Innocent Sorcerers", directed by Andrzej Wajda and Roman Polański's Knife in the Water. His feature directing debut came in 1964 with Rysopis" / "Identification Marks: None. This film was made in an unusual way, as it was compiled from several of the director's student films made over a period of time. Jerzy Skolimowski has lived and worked abroad since 1967, in Italy, Britain and the United States, spending the last two decades in California.

Awards

Jerzy Skolimowski has received numerous awards, including the Grand Prix at the International Art Film Festival in Bergamo in 1966 for the film Bariera / Barrier, a Golden Bear for Start / Le Départ in 1967 at the IFF in Berlin, the Jury Prize for Moonlighting in Cannes in 1982. For Rece do gory / Hands Up!, a film the censors banned for a long time, he received the journalists' prize at the 1981 Polish Feature Film Festival in Gdansk. In 2003 he received an "Eagle" (for 2002), an award presented to him for "the independent stance of a Polish creator of cinema of global dimensions, demonstrated in Poland and as an émigré, and for regular ties to Poland". In 2010 he received the Special Jury Prize at the 67th Venice International Film Festival for his film Essential Killing, starring Vincent Gallo.

Third Polish Cinema

The mid-1960s saw the beginnings of a trend in Polish cinema that was dubbed - perhaps arbitrarily and rather mechanically - "the third Polish cinema". After the first film efforts after the war, which maintained the pre-war style and following the account-settling "Polish school" of films made by people who had taken part in World War II, young artists entered the scene. They had been brought up after the war and their main experience was post-war reality. They matured in the 1960s, a time called "the little stabilisation". Documentary filmmakers were among the first of them to deal with the reality as experienced by Poles at the time. Soon after, similar themes started appearing in feature films.

"This third cinema", wrote Jerzy Plażewski, "searches for the truth about itself, i.e. about the time of the communist stabilization which gave rise to moral problems related to settling down in life, and required people to define their attitude towards the world around them and its ethical norms" ("Historia filmu dla każdego" / "A History of Film for Everyone", Warsaw 1977).

Battles with censorship

Jerzy Skolimowski deserves to be called the leading representative of this generation in Polish cinema. The protagonist of his first films did not gain the approval of those critics who expected films - in accordance with the expectations of the authorities - to present their subject matter in a social perspective, and who thought any individualism to be inappropriate. This was a hero, as Konrad Eberhardt put it, "who pushes maturity away", "who runs away from convention".

"There is a sizable degree of contrariness involved", wrote Konrad Eberhardt about Skolimowski's characters, "and anxiety as to how to save one's individuality, one's face, fear of melding into a community subordinated to overriding purposes. Hence a series of inconsistencies - aspirations on the one hand, laziness on the other, a desire to do something unusual and wasted university years, time lost doing nothing, opportunities thrown away" (Kino 13/1967).

Luckily, today there is no need for such a verbal balancing act, aimed at throwing off the censors, to write well about Skolimowski's films from that time. The suspiciousness of some of the critics at the time, writes Tomasz Jopkiewicz - is understandable. After all, this was an obvious attempt to escape the social rules while appearing to be ostentatiously surrendering to them. The most important thing was to preserve the imperfect 'sense of yourself', a stubborn and quiet refusal to recognise the uncomfortable primacy of the group" (Kino 7-8/2004).

And from the same article:

"Escaping, wandering at a loss, searching. Donning various faces and masks. Seeking one's own form. At the same time, there is fear of irrevocably losing what is one's own, of it being taken away. Never giving up. A struggle for the right to err, to find and then lose anchorage, something relatively stable. These are the dilemmas torturing the heroes of Skolimowski's films. They were not new, and quite widespread in 1960's cinema. But it was this director, thanks to his personal style, who was best at extracting them. He turned to all that was unique, blurring the boundaries between biography and his hero, creating a kind of lyrical, strongly self-mocking diary".

The term "diary" is entirely justified here. The plots of Skolimowski's films were largely autobiographical; the script writer and director rolled into one identified with the hero, and himself played the part of Andrzej Leszczyc in the first two films. He had to give this up in Barrier, upon a firm request from a decision-making official.

His hero, spitefully and sometimes almost tenderly called "a mooner", was sometimes compared to characters from Godard's films, and similarities were also sought in the narration method. The "third cinema", its leading representative being Skolimowski, was sometimes called the "Polish New Wave", a reference to the French New Wave.

"The year 1966. The festival in Bergamo. This self-respecting festival, which also wanted to safely emphasize its solidarity with the avant-garde, could not have found a better candidate for its Grand Prix than Jerzy Skolimowski's 'Barrier'. This film was very much in the spirit of 'new cinema', already widely recognized at the time. It is not easy to specify the features of this trend. Roughly speaking, they were compatible with the output of Jean-Luc Godard, where observed reality was mixed with the director's own 'biased' statements - about himself, the world, and cinema", wrote Aleksander Jackiewicz. ("Moja filmoteka. Kino polskie" [My Film Library. Polish Cinema], Warszawa 1983)

In Skolimowski's films, Jackiewicz valued the same "faithfulness to the real world" that he found in Godard, but which the Polish director achieved - as Jackiewicz stressed - in his own unique way. Other critics also analysed Skolimowski's films in the context of the work of French directors.

"What links Skolimowski to the 'New Wave' style is his perception - an everyday, stern, documentary-style view that discovers the extraordinary, discovers poetry in the most ordinary moments of life, and imparts a previously unknown climate to any old chattels and situations". (Zygmunt Kałużyński, Polityka 51/1965)

Though still a part of the same trend, Barrier, Skolimowski's third film after Identification Marks: None and Walkover, presents a degree of moving away from filming with the aim of portraying reality towards the language of symbols. This is also a less personal film, perhaps because the director did not play the main role, a fact owed to political factors.

Skolimowski faced even greater problems with his next film, Hands Up!. The authorities did not like the presented image of the generation of the Union of Polish Youth [ZMP, a youth organization closely affiliated with the Communist party]. They took the greatest offence at a scene in which students put up a poster with a huge picture of Stalin and give it two pairs of eyes by mistake.

The film Hands Up! made in spring 1967 was banned by the censors for many years, only to be released, ironically enough, just before martial law was imposed [in 1981]. The problems Skolimowski had with this film became the main reason why he emigrated. Years later, he said: "I feel an aversion towards it because it ruined my life. If it weren't for 'Hands Up!', I would probably still be a New Wave artist. Necessity forced me off that road", he said in an interview with Joanna Pogorzelska, Gazeta Wyborcza, February 8, 2001).

Emigration

Two films that Jerzy Skolimowski made during his first years abroad, Le Départ and Deep End, seemed to define a new road for the director. Critic Tomasz Jopkiewicz described the latter as possibly Skolimowski's "most disciplined work" though it was free in tone at the same time". The director's search was not as fruitful in subsequent films, however. Liberated from the political whip he had to consider in Poland, in the West he came against a different barrier. This was the necessity of considering - as Tomasz Jopkiewicz put it - the rules of the film industry, in an artist who performed best as the maker of intimate pictures. "Despite all their faults, the most personal ones are the best, like 'Moonlighting' (1982) and 'Success Is the Best Revenge' (1984), which mark an attempt - in a different formula - to return to the intimate stories and experiences from the first period of his work", wrote Jopkiewicz.

In his interviews Jerzy Skolimowski appears as someone very critical about his own work, who dislikes some of his films rather strongly, sometimes too strongly, to mention the adaptation of Witold Gombrowicz's Ferdydurke / 30 Door Key. The struggle Jan Jakub Kolski had with another novel by the same writer, whose work is not really translatable into film, where he moved quite substantially away from the literary original in order not to ruin the film completely, just goes to show that the failure of Skolimowski, who was more faithful to Gombrowicz, is not all that obvious.

After a period of silence as a filmmaker, acting in other people's films, in 2008 Skolimowski directed Four nights with Anna, about a man who is wrongly accused of rape, he sneaks into her house while she is asleep to help around the house.

A still from Four Nights with Anna

The Essential Killing

In 2010, Skolimowski's film Essential Killing, starring Vincent Gallo and co-written by long-term colleague Ewa Piaskowska, won the Special Jury Prize at the 67th Venice International Film Festival. Vincent Gallo won the festival's Volpi Cup.

The win was a surprise for the cast and crew of the film, as the picture is a controversial one. It tells the story of Mohammed (Vincent Gallo), a Taliban member captured in the desert by American forces, who finds himself transported to a nameless Eastern European country. He manages to escape into the vast frozen woodland, a world away from the desert home he knew. Forced into extreme survival mode, he must kill anyone who strays into his path. The film's stark treatment of the subject matter has a visceral effect on the viewer, challenging one's most deeply ingrained moral code and convictions about what is right and what is wrong.

Gallo's character Mohammed is treated like an animal - humiliated and beaten, hunted by dogs, hunted like wild game - he gradually becomes an animal, feeding on what he can scavenge in the snowy woods, killing all who stand in his way. On the other hand he is human enough to show humanity to once again become a man - a stranger, thrown in an unknown land, forced into contact with a foreign culture, but still human. The title of the film carries a double meaning, both referring to the "essence" - the most primitive and primary basis of killing - and the "essential" nature of killing in this context - whereupon killing is imperative to survival. There is an underlying reference too, to the fanatical killing of religious extremists.

The film, released just after the CIA was suspected of transporting Taliban militants to Eastern Europe, was greeted with mixed reviews from critics and audiences alike. Aware of the political overtones of the film, Skolimowski initially nearly dismissed it as being "too political", he strove to make it non-political and is deliberately non-specific as to locations (despite being partly shot in Poland). "I don't even say whether the film starts in Afghanistan, Iraq or maybe some other place, whether it's an American military base, where the prisoners are kept, whether it's situated in any of those countries. I don't say whether the plane which is landing somewhere in Europe is really landing in Szymany, in Poland." The Szymany airport in the Masurian district of Poland was suspected to have held Taliban prisoners including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

The political dimensions of the film are evident, however, according to Skolimowski, nature and the unbending laws of nature are also quite tangible elements of the film, as he explains:

"Nature in this film is important for our hero and his alien status in the new, unfamiliar environment, which is the snow-covered forests of Europe. The landscape has a hand in creating the character and create his complex personality. It makes dialogue redundant. (...) Nature is an integral part of the film. The forest, animals which need to satisfy their hunger and compulsion to kill in the beautiful landscape. This is a story about man and nature. Wildlife is shown without sentimentality, but with all its splendor. It is an existential outsider journey to nowhere. But even if Mohammed were able to escape from his pursuers, how would he ever get home? Especially important for me is the scene in which Mohammed is woken by deer. His first instinct is to reach for his weapon, to kill. The animals are not afraid of him, however. They look at him with the same curiosity with which he looks at them. If they had belonged to the same species, shared the same fate, the same laws of nature would apply to both of them. It is a moment in which the hero realizes that he is part of a larger whole. He knows that he has failed to survive, but just then he sees the beauty of nature"

At the 2010 edition of the Camerimage Festival (Bydgosz, November 27 - December 4, 2010), Skolimowski was honoured with a Lifetime Achievement Award.

Latest Works

Even though he is seventy, Jurek Skolimowski makes films which are much more brave and youthful than the majority of thirty and forty year olds. – Joanna Kos Krauze said in an interview with Culture.pl

The author of Identification Marks (Rysopis) never slows down. Despite directing his own projects he accepts acting roles (such as in The Avengers by Joss Whedon, and September Eleven 1683 (Bitwa pod Wiedniem) by Renzo Martinelly) as well as writing screenplays.

In 2013 he developed a script for Squadron 303 (Dywizjon 303) based on Arkady Fidler’s historical novel. In 2014 he started working on his new project 11 minute – a psychological thriller with Rutger Hauer, Andrzej Chyra, Jan Nowicki and Marek Kondrat.

Filmography

Etudes:

1960 Hamleś / Little Hamlet. A film joke referring to William Shakespeare's "Hamlet".

1960 Oko wykol / The Menacing Eye. A man rocking on a horse throws knives at a woman standing against the wall. He misses. He tries again - and hits her wig.

1961 Erotyk / Erotique. A girl wipes the mirror and suddenly notices the reflection of a man who then speaks to her. The girl backs away, afraid.

1961 Pieniądze albo życie / Your Money or Your Life. Based on Stanisław Dygat's short story "Pięć tysięcy złotych" (S. Dygat plays one of the parts). The plot is set during the war. Two men at a shooting range; during an argument one of them confesses he is a Jew. The military police observe the scene from a distance.

Feature films - director and script writer:

1964 Rysopis / Identification Marks: None (also set design). A young ichthyology student called Andrzej Leszczyc decides to give up his studies and join the army. This is meant to cure the existential lack of fulfilment in his life so far. Before he goes to the station from where he will set off for his military unit, he spends the day mooning about town, running errands, some of them important, some not, and meets a girl he thinks could become important to him. (Awards: 1964 - Warsaw, PWSTiF Film Festival - award for best director;1965 - Arnhem, IFF - Grand Prix for best director, together with the film Walkover; "Warsaw Mermaid" - Award of the Film Critics Club of the Association of Polish Journalists)

1965 Walkower / Walkover. Two old acquaintances meet by accident. Both are about to fight against tough opponents, his is a boxing fight, hers is a struggle to have her original project implemented at a large industrial facility. They both have to solve the same dilemma: whether to take on the fight, which looks to be unequal, or lose it (and - symbolically - also life) by default. (Awards: 1965 - Andrzej Munk Award granted by PWSFTviT; Arnhem, IFF - Grand Prix for best director, together with the film Identification Marks: None; Mannheim, International Film Week - second prize in the feature debut category; 1966 - "Warsaw Mermaid" - Award of the Film Critics Club of the Association of Polish Journalists)

1966 Bariera / Barrier. A student abandons his way of life and wanders, suitcase in hand, seeking a place in life, literally and metaphorically. Two attitudes clash in this character - resignation and a readiness to adjust to life according to the generally accepted pattern ("little stabilization"), and the remnants of youthful rebellion, refusal to accept a boring life centered around making money. (Awards: 1966 - Bergamo, International Art Film Festival - Grand Prix; 1968 - Valladolid, IFF - Jury Special Prize)

1967 (Prologue 1981) Rece do góry / Hands Up!. Medical graduates meet years later at a reunion. Provoked by a telegram from one of their absent friends, they decide to visit him. For lack of another mode of transport, they choose a freight car. As the alcohol flows, they start reminiscing about their student days, and their time in the Union of Polish Youth [ZMP, a youth organization closely affiliated with the communist party]. The result is a series of mutual confessions, vivisections revealing the heroes' conformism. In the morning it turns out the freight car was shunted around the sidings all night, so this was only a symbolic, self-revealing journey into themselves. The Prologue, made years later, is a separate introduction, the director's reflection about the world, art, and film. (Awards: 1981 - Gdansk, Polish Feature Film Festival - Journalists' Award; Barcelona, IFF - Special Mention)

1967 Le Départ / Start (script with Andrzej Kostenko). A hairdresser apprentice dreams of a career as a rally driver. He meets the love of his life and abandons those dreams. (Awards: 1967 - Berlin, IFF - Golden Bear)

1970 Deep End (script with Jerzy Gruza and Boleslaw Sulik). An in-depth psychological study. The plot is set in a public bathhouse in London. A boy working as an attendant falls in love with an older girl, is disappointed with love, and has a nervous breakdown that ends in suicide.

1970 The Adventures of Gerard - the director collaborated (with Gene Gutowski and Henry Lester) on the script by H.A.L. Craig based on four stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. An adventure story from the Napoleonic era.

1971 King, Queen, Knave (script: David Shaw, David Seltzer, based on a novel by Vladimir Nabokov). A crime comedy with elements of fantasy. Martha wants her husband dead so that she can enjoy her inheritance with his nephew who is her lover. The murder plan fails and Martha herself is killed, not her husband. It turns out that a brilliant inventor living nearby has made a doll that is a faithful copy of Martha.

1978 The Shout (script with Michael Austin - based on the story by Robert Graves). The quiet life of a composer and his wife is disturbed by a mentally ill man they have invited to their home, who has an extraordinary power - his shout can kill. (Awards: 1982 - IFF, Cannes - Jury Special Prize)

1982 Moonlighting (script in association with Boleslaw Sulik, Danuta Stok, Witold Stok). The year is 1981. Some Poles are working illegally in Britain as a renovation crew. One of them learns that martial law has been imposed in Poland, and decides to keep this a secret until his colleagues, who do not know any English and are thus cut off from information, complete the work. (Awards: 1982 - Cannes, IFF - prize for best script)

1984 Success is the Best Revenge (director with Andrzej Kostenko, script with his son Michał Skolimowski - credited as Michael Lyndon). The script was based on son Michał's personal notes expressing his alienation from his British peers.

1985 The Lightship (script: William Mai, David Taylor) (Awards: 1985 - Venice, IFF - Jury Special Prize and an award from the Union of Italian Film Journalists for the best foreign film)

1989 Torrents of Spring (script with Arcangelo Bonaccorso - based on the novel by Ivan Turgenev). The 1840's. The story of a young Russian aristocrat's passion for a married woman.

1991 30 Door Key (script with sons: Michał - credited as John Yorick, and Jerzy Jr - credited as Joseph Key, based on Witold Gombrowicz's novel Ferdydurke). Summer 1939. The 30-year-old protagonist Józio relapses into childhood and has to experience the oppression involved in being back at school, the constraint of conventional teaching embodied by Prof. Pimko, and the tortures of puberty. The grotesque form serves to expose and ridicule the moral and cultural models of the time.

2008 Four nights with Anna A crematorium worker repeatedly breaks into a woman's house at night to help with housework.

2010 "Essential Killing" (script with Ewa Piaskowska, starring Vincent Gallo and Emmanuelle Seigner). A thriller centered on a political prisoner who attempts his escape.

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